There’s an ad to your left…your right…below…and an ad dropping down from the top of your browser. You switch from Facebook to email to news and then to Amazon to check out the latest lightning deals in a matter of minutes. Our attention spans are now shorter than a goldfish, so how does your B2B brand compel an end user to convert through the millions of ads that are served up on a daily basis?
Recently, The Week magazine published an interesting article titled “Why you forget most of what you read” by Julie Beck. It’s all about how we read a book or article or even binge watch a TV series and remember it only for a couple of days—most of the content unfortunately escaping our minds soon after. The author specifically mentions “recall memory” in regard to the internet age. In a nutshell, research has proven that the internet is a sort of “externalized memory…when people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself.”
Although the article is specifically referring to consuming a large amount of information, we’ve found it to be the exact same thing when marketing for B2B brands. According to recent studies, the average consumer sees up to 10,000 brand messages a day. Yes, 10,000! So how do we get your best B2B customer to stop scrolling and click on your ad? You need to think beyond the click.
According to HubSpot, the average click-through rate for a Google display ad is .35% or less within the B2B space. And this is the number every marketer is obsessing over. Instead of obsessing over a percentage, focus on your creative messaging and path to conversion. It’s more important to know exactly where you’re leading those who have clicked on your ad and how you’re converting them from a potential customer to a paying customer.
If you sell direct to a business, are they buying your product? If selling through a dealer or distributor network, are they requesting a quote or contacting a dealer? No matter how you want them to convert, they need compelling reasons—features and benefits—to continue investing time with your B2B brand and eventually buy your product.
We’re going to wrap this up because you’ll probably forget everything we just wrote because now you know there’s someone out there (us) thinking about these challenges for you. But if there’s one take-away here that you should remember, it’s think beyond the click. And that little nugget alone should easily remain firmly entrenched in your limbic system.
Reference:
https://www.ama.org/partners/content/Pages/why-customers-attention-scarcest-resources-2017.aspx
